The film, which is the English-language debut from Austrian writer-director Peter Brunner, portrays an artist who suffers from PTSD after losing his parents in a tragic fire when he was a child. When his memories of the event are reignited one night, he sets off on a quest to face his past and build the family he never had.

To The Night is set to premiere in the main competition of the upcoming 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 29 – July 7). Director Brunner’s previous feature, Those Who Fall Have Wings, won the special jury prize at Karlovy Vary in 2015.

Co-starring in the film are Eléonore Hendricks (Heaven Knows What) and Abbey Lee (The Neon Demon). It was shot entirely in New York and produced by Austrian outfit FreibeuterFilm in co-production with Ulrich Seidl Film and in collaboration with US company Loveless. The project received financial support from the Austrian Film Institute as well as the ORF Film/Fernseh-Abkommen.

“We are really proud to work on Peter Brunner’s third feature, and extremely happy to present it to the Karlovy Vary audience,” commented Matteo Lovadina, CEO of Reel Suspects.

Reel Suspects inks deals on thriller ‘Number 37’ (exclusive)

Paris-based Reel Suspects has scored deals on its South African crime thriller Number 37 following the film’s market screening in Cannes.

The film, which had its world premiere at SXSW this year, has gone to Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Indeed Films) and China (Time Vision).

US distributor Dark Star Pictures picked up North American rights from XYZ earlier this month. Reel Suspects handles international rights.

The Afrikaans-language film is the directing debut of Nosipho Dumisa and is styled as a homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The story follows a low-level criminal in Cape Town who is cooped up in his apartment after being crippled during an illicit deal-gone-wrong. Heavily indebted to a loan shark, the man must utilise a pair of binoculars to get the cash he needs.

It was produced by Bradley Joshua and Benjamin Overmeyer from Gambit Films. Irshaad Ally stars.

‘Nervous Translation’: Film Review | Filmart 2018

Shireen Seno’s second feature revisits the tumult of 1980s Philippines through the eyes of an introverted 8-year-old.

Boasting fantastic imagery, arrhythmical cuts, an inventive screenplay and a wonderfully nuanced performance from its child star, Nervous Translation is at once a powerful rite-of-passage drama and an allegory about the uncertainty of life in the Philippines in the late 1980s, when the country emerged from two decades of dictatorship and plunged headlong into capitalism. Tracking a second-grader’s eccentric efforts to perceive the chaotic circumstances whirling around her, Shireen Seno has teased a piece of contemplative cinema out of a restless child’s play.

A well-known experimental visual artist and curator, Seno has worked with auteurs Lav Diaz and John Torres; Torres served as producer and editor on Seno’s 2012 debut, Big Boy, as well as on Nervous. Seno is certainly a kindred spirit of both filmmakers. She shares Diaz’s fascination with mining the Philippines’ past for clues to the present, and Torres’ penchant for creating fantastical stories from outdated technology (Big Boy is shot completely on Super 8) and found objects (Nervous likes to re-create reality with miniatures.)

Nervous won the NETPAC award for best Asian film at Rotterdam and its Hong Kong screening should be the first of many stops to come. Its core content — a lonely child’s attempt to connect with her aloof mother, absent father and a disorderly society — are universal enough to overcome any potential loss in translation.

Jana Agoncillo, the small protagonist, is best known among Filipino audiences for her turn as a sweet, bubbly toddler in the unremittingly life-affirming 2015 TV series Ningning. Here, in what amounts to an against-type performance, the 8-year-old actor plays Yael, a girl who spends most of her time fending for herself and entertaining her own thoughts.

Her mother, Val (Angge Santos), slaves for long hours in a factory, and is usually too tired to communicate when she’s at home. They have a strict rule stipulating silence for the first half-hour after she comes home, and their most intimate routine seems to be when Val pays Yael to pluck her white hairs. Theirs is a cold, pragmatic relationship. Yael keeps a log of hairs plucked and her earnings, while Val treats everything as an academic subject: Time is a math question and “gallivanting” is best experienced as a correctly spelled word.

Yael’s father exists merely as a spectral voice on tapes he sends from Saudi Arabia, where he earns a living. It’s obvious the mother and daughter yearn for his presence as they make do with the frequent visits of his twin brother, Tino (Sid Lucero), a musician turned businessman whose feelings for them seem much more complex than that of a brother-in-law/uncle.

Adult viewers will easily detect Tino’s affection for Val. But Yael doesn’t — and her different perceptions are exactly what Seno is trying to illustrate. As a reaction against the frosty emotions around her, the girl finds her own way to tease some order and sense out of her surroundings. Her routine includes playing a math quiz with a classmate over the phone, making a miniature dinner with her toy cooking set and listening to her father’s taped love letters for her mother.

Defying common perceptions of children in films, Yael is neither a daydreamer nor a victim. She is discerning enough to absorb everything she sees into her vocabulary, but also canny enough to treat everything with some irony. Seno’s screenplay is spot on in navigating the complexity of a modern child’s worldview, and Agoncillo steers clear of simply making her character a bitter, unsympathetic brat.

But Nervous is about much more than Yael’s growing pains: It’s also about the Philippines emerging from 20 years of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship in a collective daze, with people struggling to make sense of the opportunities and risks posed by the so-called freedoms of a neoliberal state. The adults seem more at sea than Yael, as Val struggles to contend with her husband’s overseas work and Tino silently bristles about having had to trade in his rebellious past (his band, as it happens, was called The Futures) for a comfortable life.

Seno has successfully translated all these motions and emotions into a work of structured chaos, with the viewer feeling the characters’ lethargy and disorientation through a mix of magical-realist imagery (lo-fi robots, flooded apartments and bizarre TV ads), Itos Ledesma’s blippy electronic soundtrack, and Seno and Torres’ wonderfully offbeat editing. Anxiety oozes out of nearly every frame in Nervous Translation, and for once it’s a very good thing.

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2018 competition title Nervous Translation has been picked up by Matteo Lovadina’s Paris-based sales agents Reel Suspects.

SOURCE: REEL SUSPECTS

NERVOUS TRANSLATION

Directed by Shireen Seno, who previously helmed Big Boy which played at Rotterdam in 2011, the drama is a coming-of-age tale set in the Philippines in the 1980s. It follows an eight-year-old girl who lives with her mother in the family house, where the absence of their exiled father sinks them into an oppressive atmosphere.

John Torres produced, Ronald Arguelles was executive producer.

Reel Suspects will be hoping it can complete a hat-trick of Rotterdam Tiger competition wins – the company has had rights to the winners from the last two years, Sexy Durga and Radio Dreams.

Lovadina commented on Nervous Translation: “The remarkable talent of director Shireen Seno catches this narrow and magical universe, threatened by incomprehensible adults. Perceiving this world through the eyes and ears of this shy little girl becomes an exceptional and pleasant experience for the audience.

“In very rare occasions, we’ve seen this pure innocence and candidness of childhood so well portrayed on screen. The audience in Rotterdam will be surely charmed. We hope that festival directors and buyers will have the time to sit down, and breathe, to enjoy the lightness of this masterpiece.”

Matteo Lovadina’s Paris-based Reel Suspects has clinched first sales on “My Life with James Dean,” a tribute to cinema, the often motley crew of people who make it happen, and the dreams and relations movies create.World premiering this November at Paris’ Cheries-Cheris Film Festival, “My Life with James Dean” will be introduced by Lovadina to buyers at the 20th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, which runs Jan. 18-22 at the InterContinental Le Grand Hotel in Paris.In first sales, Breaking Glass took North American rights and are aiming for a theatrical run in the second half of 2018. ProFun acquired German-speaking rights for Europe.

Optimale will release the film theatrically in France, second quarter 2018.

Written by Choosy, “My Life with James Dean” turns on a buff tyro film director Géraud Champreux (Johnny Basse) who finds fresh inspiration in France’s deep Channel coast North when dispatched to present his first feature in three cinema houses in Calais and environs.

There is a fish-out-of-water comedic element to his promotion tour: Geraud is lost as soon as he steps off the coach at his first stop after a boy steals his cell phone. His movie – a frank Jean Genet-ish LGBT tale of carnal passion – doesn’t see the most likely title to move waves at the cinemas; and Géraud is as concerned about breaking up with the film’s leading man as in promoting his movie.

And yet, and this is the magic of filmmaking, the title and Géraud himself begin to collect supporters, from the frumpy receptionist at the chintzy hotel he puts up at, to a local cultural activist who books the cinemas and has love problems of her own, to the young projectionist at the first cinema where it plays, who falls head-over-heels in love with Géraud. In maybe the film’s most moving scene, an aging woman who catches all the sessions is revealed to be Géraud’s estranged mother.

As the promo tour careers from dire screenings to trawler trips and drunken evenings, Géraud gets the inkling of inspiration for a movie which will pay an upbeat, musical homage to the warmth of reception he finally receives in this windswept part of France.

“My Life with James Dean” is shot by Laurent Coltelloni whose in-frame framing and use of primal colors makes some of the action look like a film within a film. The orchestrated physical comedy of some scenes, with couples shadowing other couples along the street, also pays homage to silent cinema.

Produced by François Drouot, Marie Sonne-Jensen and Nathalie Agazi at Paris’ La Voie Lactée, “My Life With James Dean” has other countries in sales negotiations which should be finalized before the Berlinale’s European Film Market, Lovadina said.

“Dominique Choisy’s sweet craziness is back again after ‘Les Fraises des bois,’ mixing universal themes with matters of intimacy matters in a magical atmosphere thanks to a masterful cinematography and direction of actors,” said Lovadina.

He added: “This is funny and subtle storytelling, generous and human that plays on all the strings of melancholia. A pure cinematographic moment, and a perfect fit for our elevated authors’ line-up.”

An alum of Paris’ prestigious L’Idhec film school and an editor at French pubcaster channel France 3 and teacher at the college of Amiens, Choisy broke out to attention with his debut, “Confort Moderne,” a drama about a woman attempting to shape her own life which shared the Fipresci award at Argentina’s 2001 Mar del Plata Festival. Choisy’s second feature, 2012’s “Les fraises des bois” – recounting the bonding of two social misfits, a gay supermarket cashier and a farm girl, each with a secret – was also knit with a visual humor and unspooled in northern France. “My Life with James Dean” represents a more upbeat turn.

Directed by Ali Asgari, the film tells the story of two young lovers who run from hospital to hospital, and are confronted with numerous obstacles, including bureaucratic terror. The story is entirely told in one night. The film also earned lead actress Sadaf Asgari the Silver Screen award for best performer.

The competition jury, headed by India’s Shekhar Kapur, said the film has “such amazing simplicity, truth and compassion, and yet convey(s) the complexity of a whole culture and human relationships that resonate deeply, whichever culture you belong to.”

Thailand’s Anucha Boonyawatana won the Silver Screen Award for “Malila: The Farewell Flower.” The film probes mysteries of love and spiritual redemption. The jury said it was a “quiet, extremely sensitive, beautifully shot exploration of fundamental themes of our existence.”

The Silver Screen Awards were presented on the penultimate evening of the festival. “Disappearance” was played again on Sunday at the National Museum of Singapore. “Call Me By Your Name” was announced on Sunday as winner of the audience choice prize and was also re-screened. Organizers announced that the festival had attracted some 14,000 admissions.

The awards ceremony at the Mastercard Theatre in the Marina Bay Sands complex, was dotted with multiple moving tributes to departed festival personalities.

Lesley Ho, the former co-director of the festival who worked in various capacities for the development of Singapore cinema, died in 2017. Her son and two daughters accepted a plaque in her memory and called attention to her championing of brave films.

Kim Ji-seok, co-founder of the Busan International Film Festival, and international advisory board member of SGIFF, also passed this year and his legacy of discovering was new Asian talent was remembered. Busan programmer Kim Young-woo accepted the plaque on his family’s behalf.

Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya presented the SGIFFHonorary Award to her compatriot Garin Nugroho. “He made a path and we follow it and that’s how it will always be,” said Surya.

Yuni Hadi, SGIFF executive director, and “Reign of Assassins” producer Terencce Chang presented the Cinema Legend Award to top Japanese actor Koji Yakusho. The actor had earlier featured in a packed In Conversation event at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum.

‘Sexy Durga’ Release Certification Rescinded by Indian Censors

The on-off saga of releasing “Sexy Durga” in India has come to a sorry conclusion, for now. The film did not play at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa, despite a court order requiring that it should be. Instead, it must now be re-certified by India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s film won the Hivos Tiger award at Rotterdam earlier this year and played at the Singapore International Film Festival last week. But it is proving too controversial to play in its country of origin.Along with “Nude,” the film was dropped from the Goa festival line-up on technical grounds. The head of the Panorama section’s selection committee and two others resigned, while several other jury members signed a letter of protest.

Sasidharan moved the Kerala High Court, who ordered the festival to screen the film. The version to be screened was a censored version certified by the CBFC where the title was changed to ‘S Durga’ (Durga is the name of an Indian goddess and a popular female name) to avoid offending Hindu religious sentiments. Swear words were also muted. India’s information and broadcasting ministry appealed against the court decision, but it was quashed.

The Panorama selectors, with three new members replacing the ones who resigned, viewed the film again on Nov. 27, the penultimate day of IFFI, and put it to a vote. The jury voted 7-4 in favor of screening the film.

On Nov. 28, the last day of IFFI, the CBFC issued a letter to the film’s producer Shaji Mathew stating: “We have received complaints from the IFFI (selectors) at Goa that the title of the film on the title card is shown by the film maker as “S### Durga” (where the # means rectangular white boxes) which has totally different implications and are effectively undermining and attempting to defeat the very basis of the title registration and changes effected thereby.”

The CBFC said that the filmmakers are in violation of the Cinematograph Act and the film will be re-examined. Until then, the film cannot be exhibited. IFFI concluded without screening the film. The CBFC letter provided an excuse to the festival and the ministry who would have been in contempt of court if they had not screened the film.

The censored “S Durga” played at the Mumbai Film Festival and at a commercial screening in Thiruvananthapuram without a hitch. It will now have to go through another battle before the rest of India can watch it.

The very notion of a contemporary melodrama set in post-Apartheid South Africa tricked out with the narrative and visual tropes of Spaghetti Westerns and revisionist American oaters might seem, at first blush, too film-geek clever by half. But “Five Fingers for Marseilles” turns out to be an impressively effective and engrossing cross-cultural hybrid that has a great deal more than novelty value going for it. Director Michael Matthews and scripter Sean Drummond skillfully employ recycled genre elements to enhance the mythic qualities of their slow-burn narrative and reinforce the underlying sense that their archetypical characters are fulfilling destinies as inescapable as the fates that might befall major players in a conventional Wild West saga.During the lengthy pre-credits prologue, which unfolds during the later days of the Apartheid era, we’re brought to the outskirts of Marseilles, one of several Eastern Cape railroad towns named after European capitals, and introduced to the “Five Fingers” — childhood friends bound by their yearning to rebel against the white oppressors who routinely exploit and brutalize their people. Initially, they are content to use rocks and slingshots against the cops. But when one of their number is arrested, young Tau (Toka Mtabane) fatally shoots two policemen — and then flees the area, leaving his comrades to deal with the aftereffects of his crime.

Two decades later, Tau (played as an adult by Vuyo Dabula) is a notorious outlaw who has earned every bit of his bad reputation. Released from prison after serving hard time for robbery, he attempts to turn over a new leaf by renouncing violence and returning home to Marseilles. Unfortunately, very much like the traditional Western gunslingers who repeatedly vowed to hang up their pistols and go back to their roots, Tau finds himself unable to follow through on his good intentions.

For a long time, Tau tries to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile, even as he discovers telltale signs that, after the end of Apartheid and the overthrow of white oppressors, newly empowered black locals — including some of his erstwhile comrades — are posing a different sort of threat to the community.

Bongani (Kenneth Nkosi), once a member of Tau’s inner circle, has become mayor with promises of career opportunities and civic improvements for the citizenry of what now is known as New Marseilles. And, who knows, he might actually do more good than harm if his plans pan out. But to maintain power, and his comfortable lifestyle, he’s made deals with two devils: Luyanda (Mduduzi Mabaso), a former Five Finger rebel who grew up to be the town’s brutish police chief; and Sepoko (Hamilton Dhlamini), aka Ghost, a raspy voiced, flamboyantly villainous gangster who really doesn’t need the permission he’s been granted by Bongani to take what he wants from the town.

Tau would prefer to steer clear of the bad guys. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, especially when he’s prodded by Lerato (Zethu Dlomo), an old friend and implied romantic interest, and her young son, Sizwe (Lizwi Vilakazi), who’s all too eager to view Tau as a role model. “You don’t want to be anything like me,” Tau warns the boy. But, of course, he does. And his desire has consequences.

“Five Fingers of Marseilles” was filmed on location in and around the North-Eastern Cape village of Lady Gray — Shaun Harley Lee’s vigorous and evocative lensing ranks high among the film’s selling points. But the terrain will be instantly familiar to audiences as the sort of harsh frontier setting where Sergio Leone and Sergio Carbucci once had rugged antiheroes clash with gaggles of tough customers. Bad men bestride this movie-informed landscape with guns on their hips and, in many cases, cowboy hats (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) on their heads. (There are even horses on view now and then.)

Dabula is able to bring humanizing shadings of character — guilt, regret, moral outrage — to what is essentially a South African variation of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. But he also rises to the occasion as a near-superhuman hero when Matthews and Drummond go full Spaghetti Western, most notably in a scene where Tau somehow survives sadistic torture as resiliently as Eastwood’s taciturn bounty hunter (or Franco Nero’s Django) ever did.

Beyond all the Western allusions and evocations, the film commands attention with a deliberately paced and well-observed story that focuses on, among other things, the inescapable influence of the past and the unavoidable corruption spawned by ambition. (Meet the new bosses, arguably worse than the old bosses.) When everything in a movie seems geared to trigger a climax straight out of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” however, it’s easy to be distracted from the meatier issues. On the other hand, “Five Fingers for Marseilles” is no less satisfying for being almost too entertaining for its own good.

BiFan winner ‘Black Hollow Cage’ sells to North America

Paris-based Reel Suspects has scored an early TIFF deal for North American rights on its sci-fi horror Black Hollow Cage.

Toronto-based distributor levelFILM has picked up the title and is planning a theatrical release in early 2018.

Directed by Sadrac Gonzales Perellon, the film had its premiere in July at Switzerland’s Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival and subsequently played at Korea’s BiFan, where it scooped the grand jury prize.

The film follows a girl who lives secluded in a house in the woods with only the company of her father and a wolfhound. She finds a mysterious cubic device with the ability to change the past.

The deal has been negotiated by David Hudakoc and Leslie Semichon during the first day of TIFF.

David Hudakoc, managing partner at levelFILM, said: “We are excited to partner with Reel Suspects and to release Black Hollow Cage. Sadrac Gonzalez-Perellón is an incredible talent and this intelligent, stylized and gripping film is one we can’t wait to bring to audiences.”

Matteo Lovadina, Reel Suspects CEO: “We are happy to partner with levelFILM on this feature, and bring it to north American audiences. We are sure that it will attract the public thanks to its crossover potential and incisive narrative.”

“With Theatrical releases already planned in South Korea, Japan, Spain, UK, China and now USA and Canada, Black Hollow Cage confirms to be one of the most attractive genre films of the year”.

The Man with the Magic Box, the new film by talented Polish filmmaker Bodo Kox, will be the headliner at the Toronto Film Festival (from 7 to 17 September) for the French company Reel Suspects. The company is led by Matteo Lovadina and will launch the sales for the film in Canada. Showcased in July in Work in Progress at Karlovy Vary, this feature film (whose script has been written by the director) begins in a close and dystopian future. By moving into an old building and listening to a strange radio he finds in a closet, Adam travels in time back to the 1950s. But what begins as a hallucination or a dream becomes a politically subversive reality that threatens his existence in 2030.

“The Man with the Magic Box is an amazing film, very creative and original, with a cinematographic approach that surpasses boundaries,” highlights Matteo Lovadina. “The female character at the centre of the story fits in perfectly with this new movement that places women in the foreground, devoid of sexualisation, a heroine, a woman who inverts conventional roles. This film also reinforces our traditional attachment to avant-garde Polish directors, following Demon[+] de Marcin Wrona, and our editorial line, which has always focused on films from European genres.”

Icon of off-beat Polish cinema (Marco P. and the Bike Thieves, Doppelganger), Bodo Kox moved into the mainstream in 2013 with his previous opus The Girl from the Wardrobe[+], unveiled at Karlovy Vary and which, among other awards, notably took home the Eagle for Discovery of the Year at the Polish Film Awards in 2014.

With Piotr Palak and Olga Boladz in the lead roles, The Man with the Magic Box, which is currently in the final stages of post-production, has been produced by the Poles of Alter Ego Pictures and the Italians of Vargo Film, and has notably been supported by the Polish Film Institute and Creative Europe – Media Development.

The line-up of Reel Suspects at Toronto also includes the Portuguese production Levianoby Justin Amorim (a debut feature film on adolescents who join forces to find two family members who mysteriously disappeared on the same night), the Latvian psychological thriller Firstborn by Aik Karapetian (whose international premiere will take place next Thursday in Paris at the L’Etrange Festival), the Spanish film Black Hollow Cage by Sadrac González-Perellón (Prix du Jury this summer at BiFan – the fantasy film festival of Puchon, and which will be in competition at Sitges in October), and Children of the Night[+] by the Italian Andrea de Sica (crowned best young director by his country’s cinema journalists at the Nastri d’Argento 2017).